Dave Lucey

Thanks all for your input...I agree that it sounds like a homeopathic dose at 2T/5L, that was part of what piqued my curiosity and skepticism on this.

I also do baiting, but I use alfalfa leaves in pans overnight with the mists to moisten them into a paste.  The slugs just stay in there munching away until morning, then I release my ducks onto the pans.  There are a few places that I'd rather not turn my ducks onto though.

I'll give this a try on a couple of target plants and see if there is any sort of effect.  Watch this space. :D

I just need to say...there should be a 'Varmints' forum.

Has anyone had experience with 'Garlic Water' to deter slugs?  I have not.  I just heard about it and couldn't find anything on permies...so time for a new thread. :D

I'm in the Western Washington, where the slugs outnumber the people about 1000:1.  I generally solve the problem with some alfalfa to bait them and ducks to eat them, but there are some spots that this just doesn't work for.

So, listening to Gardeners' Question Time I came across an organic Hosta grower in England that swears by the garlic water.  They spray it on the soil around their in-ground hostas weekly from April to October and the panel there insisted that they didn't see signs of slug damage anywhere in the operation.  Once I was in front of a computer, this is the recipe I found, and it lines up to what they described.

Basic recipe:
-  Boil 2 bulbs of garlic in 2L of water, until soft.
-  Mash garlic to get all the goodies out, then strain out the paper
- That's it.  Let it cool and your concentrate is done.  Store it in the fridge

To use:
- Dilute by using 2 tablespoons per 5L of water.
- Put in your watering can or sprayer
- Sprinkle over the soil in the affected area weekly
- Use more during wet weather

So, the questions:
1. Have any of you done this?...Did you have any luck?
2. Can you think of any detrimental effect to this?  I sure can't.
3. Any clue on what the mechanism of action is?  Are slugs just vampires and hate garlic?

Josh Hoffman wrote:I prefer the tincture because we grow our own peppers. I am not a big fan of drying completely then powdering to use with food. I also do not like to make tincture from powders because of the mess of pressing the tincture out of the powder.

I'm completely behind not wanting to dry and pulverize peppers for cooking, but I think there is a place for dried peppers.  Anchos and Poblanos have different flavors, and anchos are just dried poblanos.  I will re-hydrate them before using (10 minutes in a bit of very hot water), but the altered flavors persist.  You can also roast either of them (dry or fresh) and end up with very different results.

Chile Colorado is a personal favorite dish, and it just doesn't taste right without colorados (dried anaheim chilis).

Ra Kenworth wrote:Dave: it was tea. I had something like COVID or walking pneumonia -- I've never had a cough linger for so long before. It was the first time I've used mullen, not expecting it to taste slightly sweet and very tasty! I've never learned to make tinctures. Mullen is plentiful enough in my yard.

Oh tinctures are super easy.  Take the herb you want to tincture, fill a jar about half full if it is leaf/flower, or a quarter full if it is berries, wood, or roots.  Then top it up with a neutral spirit like vodka.  close it up, label it, and give it a shake every day for about two months.  It's ready to use.  

Leave the material in there, it'll just get stronger with time.  Also those volumes are a rough starting place, if it's too strong, thin it out, too weak you add more.  I label the jar with the herbs in, the date I started it, and the weights of the herbs...so I could make it the same again next time.

A fresh ginger, mullen tea would be lovely.  I'll try it this afternoon.

Ra Kenworth wrote:To like: the taste of course, plus they are great for the health, at least on the mild end of the spectrum, i could build my tolerance and benefit more. The sinuses like it as well. (Last winter, I consumed a lot of ginger with mullen.)

Ooh, I'll need to try a ginger and mullen tincture, that's a great idea!  Thank you!

So...the slippery slope of heat...

I've always eaten various peppers, but never really pushed myself.  When traveling for work and feeling a bit sick, I'd look for Pho.  It always seemed to do the trick....bone broths do that.  When especially stuffy, I threw in a few too many jalapeno slices and discovered capsicum's mucus thinning powers as it cleared out my whole head.  While soundly unpleasant at the time, I could breathe clearly the rest of the day.  A total win in my mind.

This started a pattern, I traveled for work a lot back then.  As I adjusted to the heat I started to notice different flavors in the spicy foods.  I mean jalapenos are rather grassy, but I could taste the other flavors in other peppers as well.  I started exploring peppers, less for the heat than for other flavors.  I mean the smokey, fruity flavors of a home grown habanero is amazing, but you have to be able to get past the heat to taste that.

Far enough down that road, I discovered the whole endorphin rush that comes with eating something that's 'too hot'.  It's a roller coaster, but just about the best mood improver I know.  After running into that at lunch, I'd be 'feeling great' for the rest of the day - both physically and mentally.

My rule is that it has to taste good first.  There are plenty of dishes that are 'hot for the sake of hot' and there is no fun in that.

BTW, a peach-habanero pie is still my absolute favorite pie.  The sugar from the peaches tone down the heat and the smokey/fruity flavors of the habanero compliment fresh cooked peaches brilliantly.  It needs home grown habaneros though, the store bought ones are usually bland and just heat.  You can de-seed and de-vein the habaneros to reduce the heat further, but I think it looses some flavor profile in the process.

Lots of good comments, and the articles Ben posted were great!

My $0.02,

There are plenty of ways to talk about 'spicy', but I think it all comes back to the balance of flavors.  If I add too much green cardamom to a dish it will be too spicy.  It would be unbalanced to the point of tasting bad.  Spicy-hot foods, (whether it be from hot peppers, horseradish, garlic, or even black pepper) I see as the same.  The balancing act is about gauging the palate of the folks I'm serving.

We use a LOT of garlic in my house.  Almost every dish starts with 'go peel some garlic...no, more than that'.  While my family will adore some of our staple dishes, my own mother will find them inedible because of the overpowering garlic taste - and heat.  They're unbalanced for her palate.  We tone them down when she's there and try to augment the flavors in some other way...since we all like strong flavors.

End of the day with any 'spicy flavor', if you like the other flavors around it (like garlic in my house) you'll eat it regularly and acclimate to the 'spicy-ness' of it.  If it is the heat itself someone is looking for then that's a different story and its own slippery slope. :D

Christopher Weeks wrote:So, I'm deeply conflicted.

On the one hand, I'll go to my death asserting the property rights are fundamentally different than intellectual property rights -- to the point that I essentially don't believe in intellectual property rights. If I take your loaf of bread, you don't have a loaf of bread. If I "take" (a copy of) your movie/book/news article I have essentially just looked at a thing you made -- you still have it.
[snip]

< a bit of a rambling rant incoming>

I completely understand Christopher's dilemma, but I take it from a different angle.  News (movies, music, etc.) need our attention as much as they need our money, in exchange we get whatever information (or rumors, or clickbait) they're offering.  The paywall isn't their only source of revenue, so is your attention (for ads, and tracking data and such).

If they have a paywall, I don't read it or even engage with them.  There are plenty of news aggregators that will show other outlets' news stories for the same thing.  Ground News is a personal favorite, but there are buckets.  Also, if I actually want to know some news, I want to see multiple angles on the same item.  It makes it harder to get sucked into the fearmogering when you see how different the spins are.

Also, if a 'news item' is in exactly one source, I *strongly* doubt it's news.  News is too much of an echo chamber nowadays for that to really happen.

I do pay for subscriptions for any outlet I directly value and want to support (right now that's only Ground News and The Economist (because I'm a numbers and systems modeling nerd)).  I tend to support other creators, investigators, etc. directly through other means.

</rant>

Jill Dyer wrote:I make hard boiled eggs even when I mean to make them "soft"
Observations - if the egg tips up onto its pointy end when popped into water deep enough for it to do so, then its very fresh.  After boiling, leave to cool with the lid off the pan - this avoids the black ring that can form around the yolk.  Then to peel, crack the shell by rolling on the bench, and commence peeling from the pointy end.  Somehow this arcane procedure seems to work.  Now, how do I make a soft boiled egg???

I generally prefer a method I learned from some German friends.
1. boil your water.
2. punch a tiny hole into the bottom of the egg where the air sack is.
(the German homes apparently have a special tool for this...of course they do.  I've taken to using a diabetes lancing device, it works great.  Before I stumbled onto that, I just used a metal skewer tip.  The hole in the bottom keeps the shell from cracking due to thermal shock.)
3. Lower the eggs into the boiling water on a spoon.

3 minutes for soft boiled
5 minutes for medium boiled
7 minutes for hard boiled.
(per my German friends)

Apparently they have another special tool for cutting the top of the shell off as well, so you can eat it with a tiny spoon.  I've not seen it, but I could ask them if there is interest.

It works pretty well, I'm fond of the results.  I do the same for making hard-hard boiled eggs, but I go to 8 minutes then put them directly in an ice bath and stir until I don't feel heat emanating from them any longer.  Usually 7-8 minutes.  Then they are pretty easy to peel.  If the peels stick from there, I peel them in the bowl of water.

John Weiland wrote:A bit different out of necessity.... :-)

We have very free ranging.....and free nesting....chickens.  We do our best to monitor egg laying, but as you might suspect, often lose track of egg ages.  So we end up with buckets of eggs of different ages and stages.  To ensure that I'm not hard-boiling undesirable eggs, I will coat a shallow heat-resistant bowl with a film of coconut oil or margarine, then crack and observe each egg going into the bowl for quality.  Once I have enough for hard cooking, the bowl is placed in a steaming rack in a large shallow skillet.  About 1/2 -3/4 inches of water is placed in the skillet and covered with a lid.  The stove top is set for medium high and once steam is escaping from the lid, turned down to medium for 12 - 15 min.   Eggs are essentially steam poached to a hard state and once cooled diced up en masse and added to potato salad, egg, salad, etc.  Clean up is a bit easier with the oiled bowl.

I'm in exactly the same boat, but I float my eggs before use.  It's been pretty reliable for me when determining age.  How much the bottom wants to angle up when placed in the water is the indicator.  If they sit almost flat on the bottom, just slightly tilted, they're fresh.  I'll go up to about 45-degrees before I consider them questionable, and at that point the inner white will break down pretty quickly.  I've pushed it as far as about 60-degrees, but it's dicey and beyond that they're inedible.  If they don't remain in contact with the bottom of the bowl...handle them very gently, it's a stink bomb.